Turning an acting showreel into a kind of short film

[Vital Butinar]

Hi guys.

So in the summer an actor buddy of mine asked if we could shoot and recreate a dialog scene for him to use as a kind of showreel. Of course I was up for it but it was a tough order because he wanted to do the coin toss scene from the film No Country for Old Men. 

Naturally we couldn't find a gas station around these parts that would work so we changed the setting to a service garage which worked well enough.
One big problem I had was that my buddy and his friend wanted to shoot with two cameras so that they could improvise, to which I was strongly opposed to since, since we didn't have any budget and couldn't really afford to light everything the way it should be.
I also knew we would have to cheat a bunch of things to get everything shot in a span of just three hours.

So I gave in to shooting with multiple cameras, which turned out to be a mistake anyway since one camera was malfunctioning (kept screwing up the image, which we notice in post) and we had to cross cut between different takes anyway.

But in either case I decided that I wanted to shoot a couple of other things along with the dialog just in case we wanted to turn the dialog alone into a kind of short. 

I'm not entirely happy with the dialog scene, since if we shot everything with our Pocket 4K we would have gotten some better coverage, but on the other hand I'm really happy with the additional shots that we got, because I was able to play around and create a beginning and an end.

Also the sound guy that was supposed to help out wasn't able to make it, so we had someone else do the sound who had less experience. 

Anyway what do you guys think? I'm interested in what you would have done differently and then we can try and I can try to figure out if I missed something or did the best that could have been done under the circumstances.

Thanks for taking the time and watching.